2022 Reading Challenge: Two Johannite Texts

In the summer of 2021, I was going through a personal crisis. It was pretty serious, and I knew I had to take some significant action to get myself out of it. One thing that came out of it was me deciding to become a Christian. Now, calling myself a Christian is not something that I, by any means, would take lightly, and I spent a lot of time working it out within myself before committing to it. My inaugural post to this blog describes the reasoning behind why I could accept this path.

Christianity improved my life in many ways, and lifted me out of that deep personal crisis. I was reading a lot of religious texts, praying, meditating, and doing qigong on a regular basis. But worshiping alone is hard, and I made many efforts to find a church that I could join. I checked out a lot of churches in my area, and invariably, I would decide that the church was not right for me. Normally, I would reject the possibility when reading through the “what we believe” section of the website. A common show-stopper was that the prose in the Bible was “divinely inspired,” and infallible. This seems silly to me. Don’t people realize that the texts in the Bible were written by human beings, living in an historical context? Even worse, sometimes the website would claim that no other texts outside the Bible are divinely inspired. In what kind of world could the Bible contain all the divinely inspired texts in the world, and nothing else?

I did find one church that actually agreed with my Christian beliefs, and where nothing in the “what we believe” section of their website was odious to me: the Apostolic Johannite Church. This is a Gnostic church that claims a lineage of succession that goes back to the Apostle John, who was a direct disciple of Jesus. I had already started reading the Gnostic Bible, and the ideas of Gnosticism were quite interesting to me. There is no single gnostic position, but to my estimation, the single common belief of people who call themselves gnostics is that Heaven is accessible to us in our lifetimes here in our fleshly existence.

I was really enamored by the AJC, and I worked through their introductory course on Johannite theology. I started in on another course on Johannite practice, but I never finished it. While I love the church very much, the online engagement was not what I was looking for. It falls far short of worship. It fails the “when two or more are gathered in my name” requirement. The AJC does have many churches at physical locations around the world, but the nearest one to me is a six hour drive, so that wasn’t really going to work. I still haven’t found a Christian church where I want to worship, but I did recently find a great qigong school, and that is where I go to worship for the time being.

At one point, I was considering joining the seminary there. There was another person in my general area who was in the seminary program, and we corresponded a bit over email. I also corresponded a bit with the head of the seminary program, and he told us of another church member who lived about an hour away. I was keen on getting together a Narthax, or local study group, where we could study and worship together. But the seminary student who I was trying to connect with must have been very busy, because despite my efforts, we still have yet to meet.

By this point, I am glad I never applied to get into that seminary program. I love the AJC, but getting myself into a church hierarchy would never have worked out. I’m not very good with human hierarchical structures. I’m not good at following orders, especially when they don’t make sense to me. I prefer cooperative structures. Over the last year and a half, I’ve been thinking a lot about going back to being a qigong instructor - something I did for about a year, way back when. I think I would find that a lot more fulfilling than being a priest, and I would be of much better service in that sort of role. I don’t have the time right now, but it’s on my mind, and I’m lightly planning out some preparatory work for doing just that.

During the time that I was involved with the AJC, I read some specifically Johannite books, which, believe it or not, is what this essay is all about. The second of the two books that were specifically Johannite that I read last year is The Community of the Beloved Disciple, by Raymond E. Brown. Brown tries to piece together the history of the Johannite movement of the first and second centuries A.D.

It’s quite surprising that the Gospel of John, and the three letters of John, even made it into the Bible, because they seem off-message from the rest of the New Testament. Early Johannite beliefs are, in places, contradictory to the beliefs of the proto-Catholic church that ended up compiling the New Testament. So how did this happen? Brown argues that the Johannite church and the proto-Catholic church made attempts to join forces, but that this was only possible for some of the more moderate Johannites. This caused tension in the church, and eventually led to a split. The more extreme, or less compromising, members split off into a separate sect. The other half merged with the proto-Catholic church, and managed to get some of their sacred texts recognized as canonical, after some suggested revisions. The group that refused to merge with the proto-Catholics was eventually exterminated, just like every other Christian sect of that time that the proto-Catholics deemed heretical.

It’s a very interesting story, and I’m glad to have read this book, despite it being quite scholarly and dry. And the author consistently refers to John the Baptist as JBap, which I found quite annoying. I mean, I know “John the Baptist” takes a lot of space on the page, but geeze. JBap sounds like an awful sub-genre of pop music.

The first Johannite book that I read last year was the Levitikon. This book is a variation on the Gospel of John. The story goes that the original manuscript was written in Greek in the 12th century, and rediscovered in the 19th century, translated into French, and subsequently translated into English. The Gospel of John is believed to have gone though multiple revisions, and to have had three major authors. The Levitikon reads like one might expect one of the earlier version of the Gospel of John to read. The final ending to the canonical gospel - obviously tacked on by a later author - is missing in this text. So is a lot of the language that tries to associate Jesus with messianic Hebrew tradition.

I love the Gospel of John, and I’m happy to read it multiple times. I enjoy reading different translations of it, so the Levitikon was an interesting read for me. It’s an important book for the AJC. There is some story that I forget the details of that involves the book in that direct succession from the Apostle John. So there is some sentimental draw in that for friends of the AJC. It’s also a fine translation. It reads well. And if the text provably dated back to early Christian times, it would be an extremely important historical document. But it cannot be ruled out that it was written in the 19th century as part of an effort to concoct a direct, unbroken line of succession back to John.